use me twice, shame on you

April 20, 2007 11:19 AM

is there a way to do a cross-search on used books on amazon or abebooks?

lets say i want books x, y and z, and all used. i can search for each one on amazon and add to my cart the cheapest used copy. but lets say i want to try to save shipping and see if the same seller has two or more of the books... i can do this painful task manually and try to "find" one seller that has both. but maybe somebody has automated this? i can't believe amazon doesn't have that feature (or maybe i don't know about it?)

posted by yonation to computers & internet (9 comments total)

my first thought was "bookburro" - it's a firefox plugin that searches a bunch of different book-sites when it recognizes that you're looking at a book page (like on amazon)... but it doesn't combine different books together, sorry.

good luck
posted by yggdrasil at 11:31 AM on April 20, 2007

Try BigWords. Add all the books you're interested in, and it will search several sites and give you both individual results and the cheapest total place to get all your books together.

One note: it doesn't check Barnes & Noble, which is the one major site it isn't affiliated with. But otherwise, it's very useful.
posted by cmgonzalez at 11:34 AM on April 20, 2007

Oh and BigWords isn't just for books. It used to be a textbook site aimed at students, but now it's useful for price comparisons on books, CDs, movies, and video games.
posted by cmgonzalez at 11:35 AM on April 20, 2007

if you're not familiar with it, check out www.paperbackswap.com. you can swap your used books with others for just the price of mailing, or if you don't want to swap you can buy credits which are very cheap, maybe two to three dollars per book INCLUDING shipping. I realize this doesn't exactly answer the question, but if your interest is in getting used books for cheaper and easier, this is a good way to do it, and you can often get a surprisingly good selection especially if you make a wishlist.
posted by lgyre at 11:50 AM on April 20, 2007

There's also alibris, which is supposed to be searching across vendors. They were recently bought up by abebooks, but abe swore they wouldn't change the alibris model.
posted by lysdexic at 12:08 PM on April 20, 2007

I don't think so. I asked a similar question a while back. Here it is.

What I do now is to use Half.com exclusively. Half.com has a policy where if you buy multiple books from the same seller, the shipping cost on subsequent books is reduced. So, when I find a book that I want I add it to my cart from 3 or 4 different sellers that show that they ship a lot of books. After you have done this for a couple of books, Half.com will show an icon telling you that you already have a book by this seller in your cart. This allows you to add books from the same group of sellers.

Then before I check out I make sure that most of my books are coming from one or two shippers and delete the duplicate copies. That way my shipping costs go way down. The biggest cost of used books (especially if you are buying paperbacks) is shipping. This way you minimize your shipping costs. I have found that some sellers on half.com have thousands and thousands of books.

Hope this helps.
posted by bove at 12:09 PM on April 20, 2007

add all books
posted by plokent at 12:40 PM on April 20, 2007

bestbookbuys.com can be useful, too.
posted by jtron at 1:20 PM on April 20, 2007

On amazon.com, you are still charged shipping on each book, even if you have multiple books from the same seller.
posted by yohko at 6:44 PM on April 21, 2007